This enhancement requires a radical rethink of the interface.
It's about avoiding feature creep and honing the interface
down to the minimum.

Many web sites such as disney provide a web drawing page.http://www.isketch.net/isketch.shtml is an example, though
you'll need to enter an empty room or wait your turn to see
how simple the palette and paint is. Early paint tools were
great in this respect.

SVG also needs to win the hearts and minds of people as well
as us geeks and designing intefaces for children is where
the most will be learned.

It has a 'proper' mac interface, which is dramatically
simpler than GIMP and almost child friendly :-) furthermore
it already uses pressure sensitivity, which is a requested
enhancement for SVG. Check it out, please!

There might be some advantages in cross-fertilisation between
Seashore and Inkscape, but apart from the origins (GIMP vs
Sodipodi)
and the directions (gtkmm vs Cocoa) being very different, I
think that
you will find that Seashore is very much less mature than
Inkscape.

Having said that, I still think that you might want to watch
your 'pre-literate' target audience using Seashore, and use that
insight to suggest features that could be added to Inkscape. I
would seriously suggest that working features, even if simple
that children would choose to use could with advantage be
adapted for use by grown ups?

Part of the Gtkmm work included adding a layer to allow
multiple interface types. I was thinking more about
different UI's for inkview vs. inkscape vs. inkboard vs some
future animation tool, but I could also easily see this
handling a trimmed down version with fewer features and
larger icons and so forth. So I definitely think this is
doable within the existing codebase.

Jonathan, are you interested in doing the work on
implementing this? If so, I can pass along some more
detailed directions.

I'm currently learning cocoa with a possible intention of
using clor and seashore together with inkscape and some
original stuff to create a mac specific SVG authoring tool:
code name Seascape at the current time.

This would be cool. I'm scared of feature bloat. There are
hundreds of feature requests, where i look at them and thing
"Yeah, that would be cool". But you add them up and
inkscape would be a bloated mess.

Do we really want to make the openoffice equivalent of
vector editing? (not to diss openoffice, its very nice. But
very very big, featurefull, messy as well).

Of course this is a huge argument, basically the main
difference between gnome and KDE. By supporting UI
variations we can kind of select philosophies. Simple or
full featured.

The OLPC developers [http://laptop.org/] would be interested
in this idea but Inkscape is too heavy for their requirements.
You should keep an eye out for efforts to port inkscape to
GPE/Maemo or other lightweight platforms as was discussed on
the devel list last month (August).

On the mailing list a few weeks ago there was a discussion
about creating an "Inkscape-Lite" for a distro called (IIRC)
Puppy Linux. We encouraged him to create a fork from an
earlier release of Inkscape before we switched to C++. That
branch may be worth investigating for establishing a
simplified interface version.

mgsloan: Do you have expertise with children's software?
dynadraw is distictly different from calligraphy, please try again, and if
necessary read about it elsewhere and then you can perhaps add a further
comment.

please let me know where a description of the path simlify tool is, and
where the relevant code is within the source.